ervin’s piece of web

My last evening in Bangalore has been spent at Atul’s place
with all the other speakers around and the organization team
for the “Speaker Party”. Once again great food, and great people
to discuss with.

I left a bit early with Till, Volker, Christian, Kartik and
Sheela. I got back to the hotel with Kartik while Till, Volker
and Christian left to the airport to take their plane.

This way I had some sleep, and early in the morning I got a
car sent by the organizers to get to the airport. Had my flight
for Mumbai with no problem, and arrived in time. I have to
admit that Mumbai airport is much bigger and cleaner than the
Bangalore one. There, Pradeepto was waiting for me and picked
me up to go to a hotel in Panvel (a small town near Mumbai).
I’m staying there for the next few days because I’m attending
Pradeepto’s wedding.

This post is officially the last one about FOSS.in 2007. But
likely not my last one from India this year, I’ll probably blog
about Mumbai and the wedding. As for FOSS.in, I have a short list
of things which I’ll definitely remember (in no particular
order):

• Most of the talks are all done by high profile speakers…
  I even wonder how I got talks there. You definitely have the
  best people in their field coming here. The “who’s who” of the
  Indian Free Software contributors is there, but you also have
  quite a lot of famous international Free Software contributors.
  If you don’t believe me, look at this year speakers list but
  also past years… I hardly know any other conference with such
  speaker lists (except maybe FOSDEM).
• The organization team is just awesome and I’ll really miss
  them all. Lovely and interesting people… I admit I was a bit
  heart broken when I had to leave the speaker party. I’m looking
  forward to meet them all again.
• The party at Opus, nice karaoke club, terrific atmosphere…
  and Shlipa learning how to count people when drunk (I’ll never let
  you forget this moment). @Shreyas: No need to smile while reading
  this, you were half drunk too, remember?
• The high quality of the organization (the organizers again, but
  also the volunteers and the logistics around the conference), it
  was just perfect. I’ve been speaker in quite a few conferences, and
  I’ve never seen something like this. As a speaker, you’re never let
  on your own, you always get help for anything, and you can feel it’s
  all done with a great pleasure. In short: it’s the best organized
  conference I’ve ever been to. And I don’t see another one beating this
  team anytime soon.

Last day of FOSS.in I had some network problems, and I’ve been
left with almost no access since then. Hence why I’m blogging this
only now and the entry will be slightly short.

The last two days were marked by a few talks I attended.
Particularly, Danese Cooper talk was brilliant, she’s one of the best
speakers I know. This talk was very interesting, and relevant to most
people employed to work on Free Software. How to keep your ethics. How
to make your employer move forward in the right direction. Are important
part of the equation now that we see more and more companies involved
in Free Software development.

Of course other outstanding talks were the ones by Till and Volker
about Akonadi. Very well done guys! It gave me a very good overview of
what Akonadi is, and how to develop with it. I already claimed in the past
that I would never ever work on the kdepim codebase… Honestly they
gave me the will to work on Akonadi based PIM stuff which is a small
miracle. Akonadi really looks like the way to go for PIM: shareable accross
desktops, lightweight yet powerful, a nice and clean API taking care of years
of experience from our PIMsters. Congrats to everybody involved.

Last but not least, the talk from Andrew Cowie about how to become
a contributor was quite nice too. The idea to do it along with Shreyas was
terrific, it gave a very entertaining talk. Too bad there was too much content
for the allocated slot and they had technical issue at the beginning of the talk.
They had to rush in the end, which is unfortunate for such an important topic.

Finally, we had the official closing of the conference, it started with a
talk by Rusty Russell. Basically he was asked to give a talk which would give
everybody the will to become a contributor. Then, he came up with the very nice
idea to explain is own story, and to invite other kernel hackers to do the same.
After that he invited Sheela on stage and she made her first patch to the kernel
in live. That patch was sent on the relevant lists, we learnt later that it
got applied and will be shipped in the next kernel… Yes, that was that easy!
In the end of his talk he invited almost all the attendance on the stage: contributors,
users, people knowing developers, etc.

Atul then got on stage to the closing talk, he invited a few people to talk about
other indian conferences and events around Free Software. There’s so much potential
here that it’s really nice to see some dynamics around this topic in India.

It was the opening day for the conference part of the event. Very nice introduction by Atul in my opinion. The keynote was nice too, getting some insights about Anjuta development, where it came from etc.

Then, I attended Holger’s talk about Open Embedded, interesting stuff too. It really shows the difficulties of having to deal with small devices and how it impacts the community.

After lunch (ah! great food again!), I hanged into the Hacking Room for most of the afternoon showing bits of KDE, discussing the design, trying to give information on how to get started with some of our frameworks. Nice and interesting people were here to discuss. Because of that I missed the QtWebKit talk by Simon, but it was worth it.

And finally, I had my last presentation, about the student projects we did last year in my University (and we have a sequel running this year), it had some exclusive data in it on how it’s going this year. I got really nice feedback to this talk, truely nice to see so many students and a few professors in the room. There’s definitely some will to replicate this and I’d love to help such efforts. We’ll see where it goes…

Since the first day of the conference was over, we moved to a restaurant… Followed by some of the organizers, we ended up being 20 people in there. Was a traditional “on the banana leaf” restaurant. Great people (again), awesome food (again)… I ended the day full and happy!

Daily report from FOSS.in (at least I try). It was the day were we had the KDE project day, so I was of course hanging in the KDE room all day. Unfortunately it was a quite remote room, which didn’t make it easy to find us, but we had our share of people, and at least we were sure they were motivated to find us.

Overall we had nice talks, and of course nice questions. I’m not that happy with my talks too, I think I somehow missed the target audience, but I learnt from this and will do better next time.

In the evening we had a nice party in a karaoke bar. The food was great, the people too. At the end of the party one of the organizer was drunk, she had to count us ten times to know how many taxis to get. In the end we had our taxi and went back to the hotel.

For those wondering: no, I won’t give the name of the drunk organizer for her own sake… I’ve been told it’d be disclosed by other bloggers anyway.

I got my flight to Bangalore yesterday after a night in a cheap hotel near CDG airport. In case you’d wonder: yes CDG airport is still as bad as usual… For instance I met Till and Volker there and we didn’t manage to buy wifi time there. Their portal was sooo confusing…

Anyway, we just sit in the plane and after a few hours (with a headache for me) we arrived safely in Bangalore airport. No bagage got lost so after a bit of waiting we got out of the airport. There, Atul and a couple of other people from FOSS.in organization.

We crashed out at the hotel and woke up ready for the first day of the conference. After breakfast we got to the venue which is a nice building in my opinion. I used my day to keep up with mail, prepare myself for tomorrow talks, add the final touch to my main conference talk and discuss with people. It’s really nice to meet them, lot of nice folks!

The lunch break was great too (I could I come here without talking about food?). I really enjoyed it, veggie and spicy! We also got joined by Danese Cooper and a few other people, the discussions were very interesting. Last but not least that’s the time when the famous Pradeepto joined us. Always a pleasure to see him!

Now leaving for dinner… Later people!

My defence was today… at last! I got very good feedback about my researches work for the last three years. That’s why I now have a Ph.D. in Computer Science with honors.

I guess my official title now would be “Doctor” in some countries, but it’s definitely unused in France. In any case it’s just nice to see this “complete”. I undertook to work on my research topic for three whole years, hoping to add a small piece to the human knowledge, and I apparently succeeded. It’s a very nice feeling despite all the difficulties along the path. It was definitely worth it.

On another note, that means that I’m now officially unemployed… Well, at least it gives me time to do the stupid amount of paperwork generated by my change of status. We all love bureaucracy, don’t we?

Yesterday was an important day for me. I sent the last draft of my PhD thesis to the official reviewers. That means that the purely scientific work is now done, and most of the editing work is behind me. Now I have to wait a few weeks to get their reports and know if I’ll be allowed to defend (and hopefully get my diploma) or not.

To be honest, I was really looking forward this particular day. Most of the pressure I had because of the PhD is gone, what I need is patience now, which also means I suddenly have more time to spend on KDE. But now, I’m feeling dry. This morning, I managed to get nothing done on KDE. I knew what I should do, I have a few important post-aKademy tasks to do, but I can’t seem to find the energy for them.

Then, today, my morning was a big nothing… Great way to start… How disappointing. So I decided to go for a walk downtown. Took the bus, and had lunch in a small shop. A bottle of water, a veggie sandwich and a chocolate muffin and I was feeling better already. I don’t know why I chose this place, I got there only once I think. The food is not outstanding, but pretty ok… there’s something retro in the place which makes me like the atmosphere.

I kept wandering in the city: store, bookshop, computer shop, another bookshop… This little “waste time” game lasted for a bit more than two hours I think. Then I decided it was enough, and walked to the bus stop. But, I didn’t feel like waiting for the bus, so I kept walking to the next stop. I don’t know if I missed it, but at one point it was feeling easy to skip this one too, and the next one, etc.

Halfway to my home, I suddenly realized I was close to a park and an area I used to spend time when I was much younger. So my feet led me to the park, completely forgetting the bus line… I was back fifteen years ago. Everything was still here, as if it was waiting for me. Of course, it changed too. I felt like someone who was in a coma and was rediscovering the place. And I kept walking in the steps of my younger self, ended up in front of my old school. The front changed a lot, but it’s still here… Too bad it’s closed for the summer, I’d like to see it from inside again. And I kept walking, followed the same path than when I finished my day at school…

This very long and unexpected walk actually led me close to my flat, so I ended up there, finally reaching home. I knew when I moved in this flat that I was moving close to those old memories… But I didn’t realize it until today, walking with no real purpose. It was nice to follow again the steps of my younger self. I’m generally proud of the fact that I kept a child in me, but apparently I lost some of the memories of this child along the path. And now, those memories are back… at last!

The only downside of this walk was that I kept a part of me feeling guilty because I was doing “nothing”. But I think it was worth it, and it’s definitely something I have to do in order to have more energy again for the coming years. I need to enjoy the summer, I want it to be a calm period in my life to prepare a new beginning…

We (Alexis, David, Florian, Thibault and me) left the hostel early to avoid troubles at the airport. Since we’ve been told the security was raised there it looked wise to be on the safe side. It turned out that we arrived there too early and couldn’t even check in. So we had to wait…

After the check in, everything went well: short time at the security check point, plane (almost) on time, run for the connection in Amsterdam, wait 20 minutes… We reached Toulouse airport in time: 10:15pm. Good, it was much more pleasant than our previous experience. No baggage was lost or hurt in the operation.

Finally at home! Great!

And this morning, back in the lab at 7:20am as usual…

Today was the last official day of the conference. But apparently, the security guards decided differently. We had a hard time getting into the building for hacking. We had to wait until 9:30am. The almighty Kenny Duffus helped solve the issue and that’s how we got access.

We basically spent the day hacking as more people left. And soon the labs were looking more and more empty. After lunch, I got outside with David for some shopping. And then got back to the labs as soon as possible for more hacking.

Since we were supposed to leave the labs early today, we left at 5:30pm and went to the hostel for more hacking there. Finally, we went in an italian restaurant for dinner. The food was fine, maybe a bit too salty for my taste.

And we’re again in the hostel enjoying the unreliable wifi connection as I’m typing this. Tomorrow will basically be devoted to going to the airport and waiting for our flight. We’ll probably cross our fingers hoping everything will be ok this time.

Thursday morning, we had the first session of lightning talks. Most of them where interesting, half of them were longer than expected and easily spent more than the allocated five minutes. Thibault talked about what he did on the EBN and the plans about the running our unit tests there. In my opinion he did very well. I had time to work a bit more on my animations.

In the afternoon, we had the Bonny Banks Trip. We went to the Loch Lomond for a barbeque. The place was really nice and beautiful… only one problem: the rain. Well, we’re in Scotland, we should have expected that somehow. Food was good but we basically got flooded. I enjoyed walking around though, I climbed a hill with a few others, namely Aaron, Adriaan and Troy.

When we got back to the hostel, some of the french people teamed up for hacking in the lounge of the hostel. Thanks to the wifi offered we’ve even been able to check out mail and discuss with other developers on IRC. It lasted until 1am.

On friday morning, we had the second lightning talks session which was good too. I talked in less than three minutes of my brand new animations, advocating that thanks to QTimeLine it’s very easy to do this. Then Alexis talked about what he did in Plasma, basically implementing a new kind of animation. We also had Will talking about future plans in Kopete, and Florian talking about what he wants to do there.

Friday afternoon slowly started to feel the end… The first people were leaving. That’s always a bit sad to see friends leaving. But that’s part of the deal, we’re all going to the same place and at one point to go back home.

This night we went to a very nice Southern Indian Restaurant. Very good food, I really enjoyed it and was completely full. It seems that it was a bit too spicy for Laurent though. And now, we’re back in the hostel, using the wifi and hacking a bit. I’ll probably head to bed very soon now. See you!